Palestinians Look To New Generation

But Few Think Violence Will End With Arafat Gone

A chain-smoking gynecologist, Hassan Khreishe is a leading legislator among the new generation of Palestinian reformers who are poised to emerge after the death of Yasser Arafat.

Last summer, an investigation he started revealed that cement destined for construction in the West Bank ended up in Israel, thanks to bribes, and wound up being used to build the wall now sealing off Palestinian territory. Khreishe weathered death threats from Arafat loyalists, and a fellow legislator was attacked by gunmen and later lost his leg.

But ask him whether Palestinians should refrain from the attacks on Israel that have killed almost 1,000 of its citizens over the past four years, and he scoffs.

"We're not going to stop these military operations as long as Israel is carving up our land. That just isn't going to happen,'' he said during a recent interview in Ramallah. "What Gandhi did isn't practical here. It wouldn't have worked. The Israelis aren't the British."

That's an opinion widely held by Palestinian leaders, even among the young guard that Western diplomats and Israelis base so much hope on. Whether it will change with the passing of a Palestinian icon, the man who symbolized the fight against the Jewish State, is the major question of the post-Arafat era.

The death of the Palestinian leader late Wednesday night will put to the test one of the most basic assumptions of Middle East diplomacy: that Arafat was the principal hurdle to a peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians. With him gone, there will be new pressure on the Bush administration to once again get involved with a peace process that has been largely abandoned with the war in Iraq.

Both Israelis and Palestinians alike indicate that American involvement is needed, and there's little question that Israel trusts no other country to represent its interests. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush on Thursday suggested that with Arafat gone, new opportunities for peace have emerged.

But they will have to tread carefully during the next two months as Palestinians move toward elections to replace Arafat. Any seeming endorsement of a Palestinian leader by Israelis or Americans could threaten to enrage the increasingly militant Palestinian street, which distrusts Western-style politicians who appear too eager to compromise on important issues such as the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their original homes in Israel.

That said, with Arafat gone, there are few excuses anymore to ignore the Palestinian struggle.

"While Arafat has been in power, he really wasn't prepared to go all the way toward peace,'' said Bruce Jentleson, a foreign policy expert at Duke University. "Whether the new leadership will, we don't know, but I think Arafat had demonstrated all too many times that he was not prepared to take those steps."

But many Palestinians hold to the view that the deal brokered by President Bill Clinton in 2000 -- which was not detailed in maps, they maintain -- was a plot to carve up their lands into a series of rump states dominated by the Israeli military. While many Palestinians chafed under the incompetence and corruption of the Arafat-led Palestinian Authority, that anger doesn't translate into love for Israelis or Americans.

"It's utter rubbish that Arafat somehow turned down a plan that would have granted peace at the last moment,'' said Rashid Khalidi, an expert on Palestinian politics at Columbia University who was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation in peace talks during the early 1990s. "The Clinton administration, [former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak, had squeezed all of the final status issues -- borders, sovereignty, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water, etc. -- in the last six months of Clinton's 96 months in office."

Any serious attempt at peace talks will have to confront the massive Israeli construction that is going on in Palestinian lands, said Khalidi, resulting in settlements that have doubled in size over the last decade. Israelis will have to make gestures to support the new Arab leadership, such as lifting the roadblocks that make life so difficult for average Palestinians, and releasing prisoners.

"What I do disagree with is this idea that he [Arafat] had an easy road to hoe,'' Khalidi said. "I think that talking about the last 15 years as if the Palestinians had an opportunity to build a state ignores all that was happening over the last 15 years. More concrete was poured in the last 15 years in the occupied West Bank than was poured in the preceding 20 years. The Israeli occupation got stronger ... doubling to some 250,000 settlers. All during the so-called peace process."